Intelligence

"Lively, intelligent, and quite immature, [Emily] usually burst out with exactly the comment that summed up the situation beautifully and therefore could never in politeness be said."

"Genius, throughout history, has been found difficult to classify because it varies in amount: It's rare to find a genius in the context of the noun, but most people, if not all, have a bit of genius in them in the context of the adjective."

"To struggle against darkness is not to blunder ignorantly; intelligence is needed to generate right action. Wisdom guides whether to act or not, and if so how. Sometimes darkness is overwhelming and intelligent action is required. Sometimes silence and inaction is required, but a silence which is the result of intelligence is different from that born of ego states such as pride, fear and laziness."

"Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down."

"Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough tomake them understood. It too often happens in some conversations,as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or have Things of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress'd as those thatare full of precious Drugs. They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings haveneed of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to the Weather."

"Our civilization will, of course, be "playing God" in an ultimate sense of the phrase: evolving a greater intelligence than currently exists on earth. It behooves us to be a considerate creator, wise to the world and its fragile nature, sensitive to the needs for stable footings that will prevent backsliding -- and keep that house of cards we call civilization from collapsing."

"Studies show that the IQ range of most creative people is surprisingly narrow, around 120 to 130. Higher IQs can perform certain kinds of tasks better--logic, feats of memory, and so on. But if the IQ is much higher or lower than that, the window of creativity closes. Nonetheless, for some reason we believe more is better, so people yearn for tip-top IQs, and that calls for bigger memories. A fast, retentive memory is handy, but no skeleton key for survival."

"There is a time for faith, Bishop, and a time for action. It would be a foolish man who stood on a battlefield and faced an army with a Bible in his hands. We are here to do the bidding of our Lord Almighty, but it is through deeds, as well as piety, that we serve Him."

"The general intellectual level of South Florida is somewhere just above "functionally retarded"."

"The experience of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral is the consequences of perception."

"It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years."

"I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!"

"The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong."

"Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth's atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence."

"I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of."

"...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it."

"Men were stupid to forget what good sleuths women could be."

"It is a question of cubic capacity," said he; "a man with so large a brain must have something in it."

"I’d been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins I’d seen on TV as a kid. Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, you’ll find you’re facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert De Niro–like scowl, “What the hell are you looking at? You wanna piece of me?” Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest."

"Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality."